Currently, cellular telephone carriers (or mobile phone carriers—the terms are used interchangeably throughout this specification) routinely bill users for small transactional amounts and are able to do so while making a profit. These transactions are referred to as micro-transactions and, in terms of U.S. currency, can be as small as a few pennies (additionally, larger transactions occur as well). Retailers or vendors may desire to provide their respective content or services to mobile phone users via the web or directly through the user's mobile phone, and bill for such content or services as micro-transactions. Currently, a retailer or vendor will find it very difficult to take advantage of this opportunity for micro-transaction billing for their content or services accessed by a mobile phone user because doing so would require the retailer/vendor to personally negotiate and reach a contractual agreement with the particular cellular carrier to which the mobile phone user is subscribed. The process is further complicated by the fact that not all consumers use the same cellular carrier and, therefore, the retailer/vendor would need to contract with hundreds of different cellular carriers around the globe to be able to have this billing option available to the desired global market of mobile phone users.
Certain of the above-referenced applications, U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 60/714,978, U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 60/689,641, and U.S. Provisional Patent Application No. 60/687,663, describe in part various aspects of methods for allowing retailers to easily conduct transactions, many of which may be micro-transactions, with the global market of mobile phone users, and for managing and processing such micro-transactions.
In one aspect of the methods and systems described in the above-mentioned applications, a mobile phone user accesses products and services through a platform which is independent from the carrier service of the mobile phone user, and the user is billed for a service by having the platform send a premium message to the mobile phone user to provide the service/product requested. In this manner, the mobile phone user receives a charge for each message sent to the mobile phone user that is associated with the desired service and/or product. For example, if the user requests a service through the platform for receiving text messages when a certain event occurs, such as a stock market event, then the user is charged when each message is sent to the user, thereby resulting in multiple entries on the user's carrier bill.
In the alternative to a charge for each message received by the user, it may be preferable to have a mechanism whereby the mobile phone user can be charged only once for a predefined amount of message-related service/product, thereby making the billing experience clearer to the user.